The New Unmarried Moms

Friends of ours went through it two years ago. They moved heaven and earth trying to get their daughter to give the baby up for adoption. No chance.

Of course, once the baby came, they let her move in with them, because they didn't want the baby to be punished for his mother's decisions.

 

you almost appear to be normal.

 

Just wait until the teen moms give birth to the first baby of the New Year.

The papers I've worked at have always done the little puff piece on the first baby in the region. Usually it's a story with the happy couple and the little one, along with a list of the gifts that local businesses donated.

Until it was a teen mom, which happened one year to one of my papers. Instead of putting it on the front page with a big photo and story, we ran a small standalone inside. To put it mildly, we all were feeling pretty awkward about the whole thing.

 

One year the first mom of the new year was 15.
The paper played it up anyway. The readers howled.

 

When I was a sports information director at a college, we had two women's basketball players get pregnant in one year.

I used to think that with enough education and if you could get young people to think, teen pregnancy could be reduced. That experience, and working in a workplace where there were unmarried women having babies, changed my mind. What I realized was that when these women had babies, they were suddenly important and this was their hope for the future. You and I might say, with good reason, it would be better to wait. But if you have never seen a situation where waiting produced something better, it is a tough sell.

 

Being a poor and/or young parent is bad. However, being a parent is a wonderful experience and one that people aspire to, and yes this includes teens who may or may not realize that it's going to happen likerightnow instead of after meeting prince charming.

Therefore, do we not all get why pregnancies happen even when they shouldn't? And quite frankly this troglodyte approach of "No! Never! Is very bad!" is just not nuanced enough.

Why are we so afraid to convey a complex message? Why are we so afraid of parental involvement and responsibility? Why do we focus endlessly on the teen moms and not on the parents of the teen moms? Let's focus on the parents who are failing their children and not the billboards because frankly if a billboard is going to change your life, it's likely too late anyway.

 

Yeah, shaming is tough, but kids need to have the shit scared out of them. It was one of the benefits of growing up in an era where everyone was so scared of AIDS, people were either too scared to have sex, and those who did, wore protection...

I don't think high school kids today have those same fears.

 

you freak me out sometimes, mizzou ... like those were some great benefits.

 

Unwed birth rates have been rising - nearly everywhere*.

abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/story?id=7575268&page=1


Worldwide, of the 14 developed countries studied, the highest unwed birth rates were among the Scandinavian nations.

In Iceland, for example, 66 percent of births were to unmarried women, as were 55 percent in Sweden, 54 percent in Norway and 46 percent in Denmark. The United States unwed rate of 40 percent fell in about the middle of this group of countries, about equal to that of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.


*by which I mean 'in the developed West.'

 

Well, I look at things a bit differently as a 39-year-old parent than I did as a teenager...

It sure seems like teen pregnancies have skyrocketed in the last decade or so. Maybe it's just something you notice more as you get older, but when I was in high school, it seemed to be much less of an issue than it is now...

 

Nope, teen pregnancies are way way down -- lowest level in 40 years.

http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2012/02/08/index.html

Teen pregnancies have declined dramatically in the United States since their peak in the early 1990s, as have the births and abortions that result; in 2008, teen pregnancies reached their lowest level in nearly 40 years, according to “U.S. Teenage Pregnancies, Births and Abortions, 2008: National Trends by Age, Race and Ethnicity,” by Kathryn Kost and Stanley Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute. In 2008, the teen pregnancy rate was 67.8 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15–19, which means that about 7% of U.S. teens became pregnant that year. This rate represents a 42% decline from the peak in 1990 (116.9 per 1,000). Similarly, the birthrate declined 35% between 1991 and 2008, from 61.8 to 40.2 births per 1,000 teens; the abortion rate declined 59% from its 1988 peak of 43.5 abortions per 1,000 teens to its 2008 level of 17.8 per 1,000.

 

I wonder if there is a correlation to the obesity problem in the USA.